Popular Poetry Books for Adults
Hundreds of books are added to the Library's collection each month. Here are the most popular Poetry books for adults.
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A Possible World: Poems
"For the last thirty years or more, Kenneth Koch has been writing the most exuberant poems in America. In an arena where such good spirits are rare, he has become a national treasure. In his book of personal addresses to what has mattered most in his seventy-plus years on the planet, there is a dimension of pathos and joy rare in the poetry of any era." --National Book Award (2000) finalist citation for New Addresses The three long poems -- "Bel Canto," "Possible World," and "A Memoir" -- in this brilliant successor toNew Addressesare ambitious attempts at rendering the complete story of a life. Taken together they present a dazzling picture of the pleasures and confusions of existence, as well as the pleasures and difficulties of expressing them. Other poems bring Koch's questioning, lyrical attention to more particular aspects of experience, real and imagined--a shipboard meeting, the Moor not taken, or the unknowable realm of mountaintops. As in all of Koch's work, one hears the music of unconquerable exuberance in stormy conflict with whatever resists it--death, the injustice of power, the vagaries of life in Thailand, China, or Rome. Thomas Disch has written in theBoston Book Reviewthat "Koch is the most capable technician on the American scene, the brightest wit, and the emeritus most likely to persist into the next millennium . . . His work is full of ribaldry and wit, musicianship, pitch-perfect mimicry of the Great Tradition, and the celebration of pleasure for its own sunlit sake." The ebullience and stylistic variety that one has come to expect of this protean poet is everywhere present in this scintillating collection. (syndetics)
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Haruko: Love Poems
For Haruko Little moves on sight blinded by histories as trivial or expansive as the rain seducing light into a blurred excitement Then she opens all of one eye as accurate as longing as two hands beholden to the hunger of green leaves and rinsing them back into regular breath she who sees she frees each of these beggarly events cleansing them of dust and other death Poem about Process And Progress For Haruko Hey Baby you betta hurry it up! Because since you went totally off I seen a full moon I seen a half moon I seen a quarter moon I seen no moon whatsoever! I seen a equinox I seen a solstice I seen Mars and Venus on a line I seen a mess a fickle stars and lately I seen this new kind a luva on an' off the telephone who like to talk to me all the time real nice Resolution # 1,003 I will love who loves me I will love as much as I am loved I will hate who hates me I will feel nothing for everyone oblivious to me I will stay indifferent to indifference I will live hostile to hostility I will make myself a passionate and eager lover In response to passionate and eager love I will be nobody's fool Foreword WHAT IS THIS thing called love, in the poems of June Jordan, artist, teacher, social critic, visionary of human solidarity? First of all, it's a motive; the power Che Guevara was trying to invoke in his much-quoted assertion: "At the risk of appearing ridiculous . . . the true revolutionary is moved by great feelings of love." I think also of Paul Nizan: "You think you are innocent if you say, 'I love this woman and I want to act in accordance with my love,' but you are beginning the revolution. . . . You will be driven back: to claim the right to a human act is to attack the forces responsible for all the misery in the world." Neither of them, admittedly, was claiming the love of a woman for women, the love of a man for men, as revolutionary, as a human act. But the motive is "directed by desire" in Jordan (syndetics)
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The Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
This comprehensive and authoritative collection of all 1,775 poems by Emily Dickinson is an essential volume for all lovers of American literature. Only eleven of Emily Dickinson's poems were published prior to her death in 1886; the startling originality of her work doomed it to obscurity in her lifetime. Early posthumous published collections -- some of them featuring liberally "edited" versions of the poems -- did not fully and accurately represent Dickinson's bold experiments in prosody, her tragic vision, and the range of her intellectual and emotional explorations. Not until the 1955 publication of The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson , a three-volume critical edition compiled by Thomas H. Johnson, were readers able for the first time to assess, understand, and appreciate the whole of Dickinson's extraordinary poetic genius. This book, a distillation of the three-volume Complete Poems , brings together the original texts of all 1,775 poems that Emily Dickinson wrote. "With its chronological arrangement of the poems, this volume becomes more than just a collection; it is at the same time a poetic biography of the thoughts and feelings of a woman whose beauty was deep and lasting." -- San Francisco Chronicle (syndetics)
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Pieces of A Song: Selected Poems
Feminist Beat poet Diane di Prima was born in Brooklyn, New York. She attended Swarthmore College for two years before moving to Greenwich Village in Manhattan and becoming a writer in the emerging Beat movement. There, she developed friendships with poets Amiri Baraka, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Frank O'Hara and Audre Lorde. After joining Timothy Leary's intentional community in upstate New York, she moved to San Francisco in 1968. One of her collections of poetry, The Poetry Deal, is also published by City Lights Publishers. Di Prima was named Poet Laureate of San Francisco in 2009. She has been awarded the National Poetry Association's Lifetime Service Award and the Fred Cody Award for Lifetime Achievement and has also received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Committee on Poetry, the Lapis Foundation and the Institute for Aesthetic Development. St. Lawrence University granted her an honorary doctorate. (syndetics)
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In the American Tree
This anthology offers the most substantial collection of work by the Language Poets now available, along with 130 pages of theoretic statements by the poets represented. As such, it does for a new generation of American poets what Don Allen's New American Poetry did for an earlier generation. Poets represented include Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Clark Coolidge, Michael Davidson, Ray DiPalma, Robert Grenier, Lynn Hejinian, Fanny Howe, Susan Howe, Bernadette Mayer, Michael Palmer, Bob Perelman, Barrett Watten, and Hannah Weiner. "This historic anthology brings into long needed focus the only serious and concerted movement in American literature of the past two decades. It will be indispensable". -- Peter Schjeldahl (syndetics)
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Selected Poems of Langston Hughes
Langston Hughes electrified readers and launched a renaissance in Black writing in America-the poems in this collection were chosen by Hughes himself shortly before his death and represent stunning work from his entire career. The poems Hughes wrote celebrated the experience of invisible men and women- of slaves who "rushed the boots of Washington"; of musicians on Lenox Avenue; of the poor and the lovesick; of losers in "the raffle of night." They conveyed that experience in a voice that blended the spoken with the sung, that turned poetic lines into the phrases of jazz and blues, and that ripped through the curtain separating high from popular culture. They spanned the range from the lyric to the polemic, ringing out "wonder and pain and terror-and the marrow of the bone of life." The collection includes "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," "The Weary Blues," "Still Here," "Song for a Dark Girl," "Montage of a Dream Deferred," and "Refugee in America."It gives us a poet of extraordinary range, directness, and stylistic virtuosity. (syndetics)
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Passion: New Poems, 1977-1980
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